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Here’s an exchange between Eric Schmidt and Jeff Jarvis from this week’s Aspen Ideas Festival, posted on Eric Reasons’ blog. Take a moment to watch.

More from Eric:

Moreover, if my previous assertions are anywhere near correct, is this desirable from an economic standpoint for the U.S., given our current policies? I asked if there any real money to made in a “knowledge economy” in the long run:

Because as businesses whose product is reliant on intellectual property shrink due to Internet-based efficiencies, consumers are reaping the rewards of these efficiencies. Fewer people are employed by this sector, but fewer consumers are having to pay for products previously only produced by this sector.

To quote Jeff Jarvis from a different post:

Craigslist is blamed for destroying (that’s from the publishers’ perspective) $100 billion in classified ad value, replacing it with its reported $100 million revenue.

If we outsource mass production–the parts of our economy that are actually governed by the laws of supply and demand (scarcity)–and shift it towards a knowledge economy headed for deflation (abundance), what’s left?

Click here to read the rest of Eric’s post

Six months after being launched, Facebook Connect is becoming more and more ubiquitous as a 3rd-party registration option for sites seeking user-generated content.

Here’s a look at the numbers from Silicon Alley Insider:

As much as Beacon was Facebook’s low point, that service’s replacement, Facebook Connect, is vaulting the company to new heights six months after its November 2008 launch.

Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Nancy Scola over at TechPresident just posted some great photos from Personal Democracy Forum earlier this week. Be sure to check them out below and go here to see what others are saying about the great job the PDF team did to pull off another great conference this year. Thanks again to everyone who came out.

For more on PDF, visit personaldemocracy.com.

Yesterday, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra launched USAspending.gov, a tool that will allow individuals to look at and track government spending online.

From USAspending.gov:

USAspending.gov, a re-launch of www.fedspending.org, provides this information to the public, as collected from federal agencies, in an easy to use website. The data is largely from sources: the Federal Procurement Data System, which contains information about federal contracts; and the Federal Assistance Award Data System, which contains information about federal financial assistance such as grants, loans, insurance, and direct subsidies like Social Security.

Here’s the introductory video from USAspending.gov:

Today I’ll be speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, along with some great folks you know from politics, tech/web and the media, so be sure to follow #pdf09 on Twitter and check back here soon for the video from the panel I’ll be sitting on this afternoon with Jack Dorsey, Rep Steve Israel, Clay Shirky, and Ellen Miller. Until then, go here to watch some clips from past PDFs.

For seven months while the New York Times reporter David Rohde remained in Taliban custody inside Afghanistan, the NY Times Co. managed to keep Rohde’s kidnapping off the news wires to avoid drawing attention — a task that proved to be much easier than keeping the news off Wikipedia. After Rohde escaped and found his way back to safety, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in on Twitter that the community’s efforts may have saved Rohde’s life.

More from the NYT:

or seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world.

A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping.

Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet — even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous.

The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. In an interview, Mr. Wales said that Wikipedia’s cooperation was not a given.

“We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” he said. “I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

To read more, check out the story on NYTimes.com.

With today’s technology keeping us all virtually connected, is it really possible to completely disconnect?

Check out Dave Sirota’s piece over on Salon:

As you read this, I am somewhere in rural China, probably disoriented, perhaps eating a fish eye, and certainly not paying attention to the news. This column was the last thing I wrote before embarking on what’s become an all-too-rare experiment in human life: I decided to see what will happen when I go fully off the grid.

Because I am completely cut off, you cannot call or text me from your phone; you cannot IM, Friend or Tweet me from your computer; and you cannot message me via my avatar on Xbox Live. You cannot even e-mail me or leave me a voice mail — my mailboxes tell you that all messages are being deleted, and that you will have to recontact me when I’m back. (Legend has it that Napoleon waited until he received two letters to respond to requests, figuring that most problems become moot in the interim — I guess I’ll find out if he is right.)

The prospect of going technologically cold turkey was daunting for me, one of millions of information junkies now hooked on connectivity. I vaguely recall a life without cellphones and computers (well, other than Nintendo), but my addiction has clouded that memory in sepia tones, making it seem a century ago. And so as I prepared for my current plunge into information deprivation, I felt like I was readying for a journey in a time-traveling DeLorean.

For more, read the whole piece on Salon

Be sure to check out Jeff Jarvis’ take on the role of Twitter and traditional media in the context of what we’ve seen in the fallout following the Iran elections and the Michael Jackson’s death.

From Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine:

Reporters have been calling today looking into the importance of Twitter and social media in the two big stories of the month: Iran and Michael Jackson. Have we come to a next step stage in social media’s impact on news? Maybe.

Certainly the Jackson news spread quickly via Twitter. TMZ.com got the news first and it spread from tweet to retweet and then it spread beyond the web as each of those Twitterers acted as a node in a real-life network. An AP reporter told me she was riding on a bus when someone came on and announced the news to all the passengers – that person was a node, the bus the network – and then everyone on the bus, she said, took out their smart phones and spread the news farther. The live, ubquitous, mobile web is an incredible distribution channel for news.

I also spoke with Tampa Bay’s Eric Deggans and we wondered together about the arc of the Jackson story in big media versus our media. I’ll just bet that the story will die off on Twitter trends, Technorati, YouTube, and Facebook sooner than it finally exhausts its welcome – and our patience – on cable news. Back in 2005, I said that TV news was paying more attention to Jackson’s trial than the audience was, as evidenced by discussion on blogs, which lost interest in the story long before TV did; indeed, they never obsessed on Jackson as TV did and TV believed we wanted to.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff’s post.

Jerry Brown had a big lead before Antonio Villaraigosa dropped out earlier this week. Now, the first serious poll surveying a head-to-head match-up has Jerry Brown with an even larger lead over Gavin Newsom.

The latest J Moore Methods survey finds Jerry Brown leading Gavin Newsom in a two-way race for the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor 46-to-26 percent. It’s the first serious poll we know about that considers a Brown-Newsom match-up.

Because at least half of us at Calbuzz have been in the polling business (hint: it’s the much younger guy), we’re pretty darn careful about putting much stock in private polls. In this case, however, we’ve got data (and crosstabs) from a guy whose work and reputation we know is rock solid, whose client is NOT one of the candidates and who has no horse in the race.

So with 525 completed surveys with Democrats and independents and a 4.7 percent margin of error, this June 20-23 phone survey of California voters is packed with reliable data about the shape of the Democratic race.

Newsom’s spinners see a 46-26 percent race as a half empty glass for Brown. It’s a sign of weakness, they argue, that a current statewide official, former governor and son of a governor, who’s been on the state ballot 13 times can’t manage 50% against a statewide newbie from San Francisco.

Good spin, but just that.

Not only does Brown—who has yet to announce his candidacy—hold a 20-point lead more than a year before the primary, but among voters age 60 and older, the AG’s lead is 54-20 percent. And that matters because, as Moore told us: “The average age in the June 2010 Democratic primary electorate will likely be over 60.”

California is a mess, but I really believe Jerry Brown can turn things around. He’s got a history of providing innovative solutions and leadership. That’s what California needs now—forward-looking policies and real change to bring California back on top. And that’s why you’re seeing Jerry’s broad support across California. If you have not joined him yet, sign-up at www.jerrybrown.org.

Last week’s rollout of the newest version of the Apple iPhone, the 3G S, introduced the ability to upload video directly from the phone, causing a spike in uploads from mobile devices to the video platform, up more than 400% last week. With mobile video continuing to stream out of Iran, the true impact of the spread of mobile video has yet to be seen.

But as phones become more advanced, will the ability to upload mobile video directly to YouTube on the go be a game changer? Tell me what you think in the comments.

TechCrunch has the story:

If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GS’s impressive video functionality, here’s your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.

Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).

Click here for the full story over at TechCrunch